Purple Butterfly ) Period drama. Starring Zhang Ziyi. Written and directed by Lou Ye. In Mandarin and Japanese with English subtitles. R. 127 minutes. At the 4-Star.)

The prolific Zhang Ziyi isn't just an accomplished action star, she's also quite a talented actress. Sometime between filming "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers," Zhang put away the high-flying kicks and found time to make a gorgeously shot, ambitious epic called "Purple Butterfly."

As a member of an anti-Japanese resistance organization in 1930s Shanghai, Zhang is called upon to wield a gun, but in the mind's eye of director Lou Ye, it is mostly her smoldering gaze that is dangerous. Lou's debut feature was the intoxicating "Suzhou River," a nod to Hitchcock's "Vertigo" that, like "Purple Butterfly," involves the self-destruction of a young man obsessed with a comely woman; both films paint Shanghai as a beautiful, moody city filled with impossible love and broken dreams.

Ding Hui (Zhang) became a member of the resistance group Purple Butterfly after seeing her brother, a publisher of an underground anti-Japanese newspaper, assassinated by the Japanese. The group's eventual target, however, is Ding's former lover, Itami (Toru Nakamura), a Japanese man she met in Japanese-occupied Manchuria three years before.

Complicating matters further is an innocent man, Szeto (Ye Liu), whose fiancee is accidentally killed during a shootout. Szeto is mistakenly thought to be the assassin hired to rub out Itami, but the now-suicidal fellow may fill the bill anyway.

The plot of the slow-moving but rich "Purple Butterfly" is sometimes inscrutable, as Lou is the kind of director who presents pieces of the puzzle rather than a complete picture, as Hollywood and its attention-deficit generation customers often demand. But oh, what pieces they are. Don't know what's going on? Check out the lonely lamppost on a rain-drenched 1930s street ... muse over Zhang's chic outfits ... bathe in the sumptuous cinematography and set design.

At the center of it all is, of course, Zhang. Charismatic and intense, she excels in her most grown-up role to date. Her Ding Hui is independent, smart and complicated; she may be an anti- Japanese resistance heroine in 1930s Shanghai, but she speaks to a modern generation.